Hansard

I want a low-carbon future, I want Scotland to play its full part in the fight against climate change and I want to have spent my time as a representative in the Parliament helping to ensure that our decisions put in place the mechanisms and systems that will ensure that we are not storing up catastrophe for our kids and their kids in the future.

I agree with Mark Ruskell that there is no greater issue for the world’s Governments today than climate change. I have been listening to stakeholders’ views on our efforts to reduce carbon emissions in Scottish society and sectors, but I am acutely aware of the importance of ensuring that our decisions do not destroy communities and people’s livelihoods. My parents had their lives turned upside down as a result of the destruction of the sector that paid my father’s wages in the 1960s and 1970s. My parents are from Clydebank and my dad was an engineer in John Brown’s shipyard. Oil and gas gave my family a lifeline. In 1977 or 1978, my mum and dad packed us off to Aberdeenshire to ensure that we had a future and that my dad had a second chance as a planning engineer, not of ships but of drilling and production installations in the North Sea. Many of their friends did not make the move to the north-east and many of my dad’s friends never worked again.

If we multiply my family’s story thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of times, then add the next generation of native north-easters who have been working in the industry since they left school and have known nothing else, and then add in the wider economy that oil and gas prosperity has engendered, we might start to get a picture of the impact that a transition away from fossil fuels could have on my part of Scotland and the people I represent, if it does not take into account the need for the shift to be just, planned, managed and resourced.

As members can probably tell, the issue is deeply personal for me. The past two years have been very tough for many people I know who have either been wondering whether they will keep their jobs or have lost theirs. The north-east should be at the forefront of all our minds as we move towards our shared ambition of transitioning away from the burning of fossil fuels. I welcome what the Scottish Government has already done in that regard, particularly through investment in offshore wind, the city deals, the transition training fund and on-going substantial infrastructure investment, particularly in rail. I welcome the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Economy’s remark that oil and gas industry representatives will be included in the just transition commission.

Does our emissions ambition mean the end for oil and gas? No—nowhere near it. We will continue to need feedstock for chemicals and manufacturing into the foreseeable future. In this entire chamber, there will be not one item among the furniture that we are sitting on, the clothes that we are wearing and the building that we are housed in, that does not have an element of oil-produced material. Similarly, in considering viable low-carbon alternatives to diesel and petrol to fuel our vehicles, we can look at hydrogen, as we are already doing in Aberdeen city. Hydrogen manufacture will be dependent on the feedstock coming from our offshore reserves, particularly of gas. Last week, a German start-up called Sunfire was given €25 million of investment from the steel industry in Germany to power steel plants with hydrogen. We have a good opportunity to supply that kind of fuel.

We have not only the material resources that will power manufacturing and low-carbon alternatives but the expertise and supply-chain capability in the oil and gas industry that will be vital as we explore the alternative renewable energy that we will need to revolutionise transport and heat our homes, schools and hospitals. We must harness that now and put in place plans for the north-east to be the energy capital. We should be manufacturing the hardware that we can use for that revolution and exporting our hardware and expertise all over the world, as we have done for decades in oil and gas. We need to invest in research into new technologies, as we are doing with Hywind and with wave and wind power. We need to scoop up kids from schools into engineering training that is focused on the renewables revolution and that has the same guarantees of jobs at the end of it as such training in the oil and gas sector has had for nearly two generations.

On Friday, I was proud to join my colleague Paul Wheelhouse in the north-east village where I grew up, Newburgh, to officially open the national decommissioning centre there. I am excited about what groundbreaking technologies it will produce. Decommissioning is not the consolation prize as we transition; it is just one of a suite of investments that we have to make to safeguard the livelihoods of those in the north-east. Those investments cannot just be the Government’s responsibility, which was the substance of my intervention on Maurice Golden. I asked him about the responsibility of private companies in the oil and gas industry as we look for an alternative to burning fossil fuels.

The Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Bill means that Scotland will have the toughest climate change legislation in the world. By the end of the parliamentary process, it might have become even tougher. Scotland is stepping up to the challenge. The huge potential tor new jobs and the opportunities arising from the transition towards a low-carbon economy must have a north-east focus wherever possible. We are skilled, we are diverse and no transition should ever have the same negative legacy for communities as shipbuilding communities faced in the 1970s. I know that the Scottish Government is focused on that, and I will continue to argue for decarbonisation alongside arguing for the north-east to be at the epicentre of our bid to realise that ambition.